Home Affairs, Administrative Appeals Tribunal websites hit by cyber attacks

Key PointsThe Department of Home Affairs was hit by a cyber attack, impacting online immigration services.A department spokesperson says no personal data was accessed in the attack.The Administrative Appeals Tribunal website was also targeted.

The Department of Home Affairs has confirmed it was the victim of a cyber attack, preventing people from temporarily accessing online visa and citizenship applications.

The attack came after a pro-Russia hacker group said in a Telegram post on Thursday night that it would target the department’s website over Australia’s support for Ukraine.

“The Department of Home Affairs is aware of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the department’s website overnight that briefly prevented access to both the website and online portals,” a spokesperson told SBS News in a statement on Friday.

“No departmental holdings, including personal or sensitive information, were accessed by the threat actor.

“An investigation into the circumstances surrounding the incident is underway, but initial assessments indicate that the DDoS attack was solely designed to prevent access to our websites.”

DDoS attacks target websites and servers by disrupting network services, usually by overloading them with requests.

SBS News understands the Home Affairs website was down for around five hours between 10pm on Thursday and 3am AEDT on Friday morning before it was restored.

The website appeared to still be experiencing intermittent issues on Friday afternoon as a result.

The Department of Home Affairs website appeared to still be experiencing intermittent issues on Friday afternoon. Source: SBS News

The group claiming responsibility stated in another post on Telegram that it had also attacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) website.

The AAT confirmed it “experienced an incident” that required it to “temporarily” close down one of its systems.

“We successfully deployed measures to deal with the incident and the system is now back online,” an AAT spokesperson told SBS News in a statement on Friday.

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